In recent years it has become popular to use LED lighting to provide illumination for automobiles, including especially headlights, fog lights, taillights, signal lights, and emergency indicators. LED lights can be superior to filament or gas bulbs in terms of efficiency, life span, size, directional control, light intensity and light quality. High intensity LED lights, especially when used for headlights and fog lights generate a significant amount of heat in their semiconductor junctions. This heat can cause problems such as melting or otherwise deteriorating the LED light itself, or its surroundings. In extreme cases the heat can create a fire risk.
To address the excessive heat problem, it has been known to provide fans or to make a large body out of heavy rigid materials to disperse the heat. Fans are not ideal because they consume energy, take up valuable space, make noise, and tend to wear out before the LED lighting element. Using a large rigid body to act as a heat sink is also problematic because of cost and space requirements. What is needed is a mechanism for removing heat from semiconductor junctions without using a fan and without using a large rigid body.